This show about the depiction of witches across the centuries is spirited but
ultimately rather samey, says Richard Dorment.

You might not think that an exhibition about the representation of witches in art would have much contemporary relevance. But because ‘Witches & Wicked Bodies’ opened during a week when newspapers were full of reports about abuse directed at prominent women by internet trolls, I found it hard to look at the way witches are depicted in the prints, drawings and paintings on show and not notice the sheer hatred of women and their bodies it reveals.

Of course, Renaissance artists were merely illustrating folk tales and commonly held beliefs, not targeting real people like the sickos on Twitter.

Even so, both kinds of abuse reflect impulses buried deep in the unconscious that, in each case, the arrival of a new medium of communication helped bring to the surface. For just as the internet seems to tap into some of the darkest places in the human mind, so the invention of the printing press was in part responsible for the dissemination of an even more frightening manifestation of misogyny - the witch hunts that began to sweep through Europe in the 15th century.

One book in particular, ‘Malleus Malificarum‘ (‘Hammer of Witches’), written by two Dominican monks and published in 1486, created an image of witches as hate-filled old hags whose hideous appearance was but the outward manifestation of their cruel natures.

As Deanna Petherbridge explains in her catalogue essay, stories about women with malevolent powers had been around since the beginning of time - think of the sailors of Odysseus bewitched by Circe, of the poisoned cloak Medea sent to her rival Glauce, or of Nimue’s enchantment of Merlin. But these fictional characters were beautiful young women and their practice of the magic arts is more like sorcery than witchcraft.

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True, witches are the human embodiments of evil. Their pact with the devil gives them magical powers of divination, incantation and above all malediction. Salvador Rosa’s ‘Witches at their Incantations’ in the National Gallery in London amounts to a catalogue of the practices associated with the malevolent occult in the mid-17th century.

The nocturnal scene depicts a witch’s coven in barren landscape dominated by the ghastly sight of a decomposing corpse hanging from a blasted tree. Among the naked old ladies at the centre of the scene, one clips a toenail from the corpse, two others hold a mirror up to a wax figure representing the living person on whom they are laying a curse, and a fourth stirs a caldron in which she is concocting a brew that requires toads, snakes and human bones. At the right, a hideous necromancer presents her sisters with a new-born babe for human sacrifice.

Unusually, Rosa also includes a few males in the scene, one of whom impales a human heart at the end of a sword. But notice that the male witches (warlocks) are not only clothed but they are not nearly as grotesque in appearance as the women. Though it is difficult to be sure, it looks too as though they are occupied with less heinous crimes like divination and fortune telling.

The exhibition includes sections on sorceresses, the weird sisters from Macbeth and on the practice of witchcraft by the casting of spells and raising of the dead. After looking at dozens of works showing physically repellent crones engaged in unnatural (and specifically sexual) acts, you being to suspect that the depiction of their misdeeds granted artists the freedom to show aspects of human behaviour that would not have been acceptable in any other context.

Though a few artists, like Goya, include nude young women alongside the hags who teach them to ride broomsticks, were witches not identified as old and ugly, a lot of the pictures in this show would have been seen as pornographic.

This is a spirited show, full of fascinating images by artists ranging from Durer to Goya. The organiser and author of the catalogue, artist Deanna Petherbridge, must have spent months in digging out rarely seen prints and drawings by artists of whom most of us have never heard. More important, her excellent introductory essay helps us to make sense of a vast subject.

At a certain point , though I began to feel that there are only so many representations of withered dugs and snaggle-toothed old ladies a viewer can take before they all begin to look the same.

The exhibition does change gear when English artists of in the late 18th century begin to paint and draw actresses playing witches on stage. But when it comes to 20th century and contemporary representations of witches, the quality of the work on show plummets.

So though the show is fun, it’s not a must unless you have a particular interest in the subject.